Our mixed-up state

LITTLE ROCK — Some of us were pondering the other day whether Arkansas was devolving politically more into Alabama, as I have lamented, or Oklahoma, as I also have lamented.

Before I relate my conclusion, thus my ultimate lamentation, let me hasten to stipulate that I dearly love our charmingly peculiar state and believe it always will remain distinctive.

Only one place-ours-could produce Bill Clinton and Wes Clark and Mike Huckabee and the Razorbacks and the 25th-largest daily newspaper in America.

So do not bother inviting me to love Arkansas or leave it. I love it. I shall not leave it, at least under my own power.

However . . .

Arkansas, by virtue of its location and settlement pattern and topographical diversity, has always been less a place of singular political culture than an amalgam of its adjoining states and their political cultures.

Our eastern Delta region bears a clear Mississippi similarity. The deep southern section, sometimes called LA for Lower Arkansas, adapts some flavor of Louisiana. Southwestern Arkansas can get a little Texas-like. Fort Smith may not like hearing this, but it contains a certain Oklahoma trait. The prosperity corner in the northwest is not unlike certain sections of Oklahoma and Missouri.

Likewise, the current right-wing Republicanizing trend of Arkansas puts the state at risk of combining the worst of the right-wing elements of other places-even, yes, Alabama, though it doesn’t abut.

Alabama’s confirmed right wing Republicanism is grounded in a race-based and religion-based backward intolerance.

Arkansas has always radiated lesser increments of that. Central High was bad, but Selma was worse. Alabama declined to repeal its 1950s-era segregation amendment. We got ours repealed by a narrow margin.

We in Arkansas have a bountiful supply of our own fundamentalist and evangelical blenders of church and state. But at least we have not had a chief justice of the Supreme Court like Alabama’s-yet-who built a public monument to the Ten Commandments on public grounds.

Oklahoma’s right-wing Republicanism is of a different varietal. It is less about race and religion, at least directly, than about a frontier cowboy independence and toughness, even meanness.

Oklahoma is a northern extension of Texas, but without the softening Hispanic influence.

This ongoing devolution of Arkansas offers some of that, as well. We have the high-speed cowboy state senator from south of Fort Smith, Bruce Holland. We have the growing influence of the anti-government Koch brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, which just beat a moderate Republican for the state Senate from Benton County.

This Koch outfit also has stuck its nose into Little Rock’s water supply by citing individual property rights to resist our ability to preserve and protect Lake Maumelle.

Put the worst elements of Alabama and Oklahoma together and here is what you might get-a state with a certain bipolarity, afflicted with frontier independence on one hand and religious intolerance on the other, giving us a government that asserts no power whatever except to try to dictate narrow religious doctrine.

Oh, dear. Now I’ve depressed a few of you.

Take heart. Awareness of the dire possibility is the first essential step in resisting it.

Anyway, maybe we’re neither Alabama nor Oklahoma, but merely West Virginia.

By that I mean a poor and working-class state with a conservative Democratic tradition that is currently being abandoned only temporarily because of some altogether odd and misplaced aversion to Barack Obama.

Did you see the news last week that West Virginia’s top three Democratic officeholders-a U.S. senator, a governor and a U.S. representative-are all declining to go to their party’s national convention where they would have to cast a ballot for Obama’s nomination?

That’s not the case in Arkansas. Gov. Mike Beebe, U.S. Sen. Mark Pryor, U.S. Rep. Mike Ross and Attorney General Dustin McDaniel all will be attending the Democratic convention as super-delegates, or “pledged party leaders.”

The difference? Well, I wonder.

All three West Virginia Democrats are on the ballot this year. But in Arkansas, Beebe is term-limited; Pryor is not on the ballot until 2014; ditto McDaniel; and Ross is getting out altogether after this year.

Our difference with West Virginia might merely be timing and political convenience.

So I’m holding out the rather ironic hope that West Virginia, not Alabama or Oklahoma, is our nearest look-alike.

My long-held dream that we might emulate the liberally bucolic Vermont-that’s not looking likely to happen anytime soon.

John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.